Erik Erikson and his problematic identity.

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association http://apa.sagepub.com/

Erik Erikson and His Problematic Identity Robert S. Wallerstein J Am Psychoanal Assoc 2014 62: 657 DOI: 10.1177/0003065114547637 The online version of this article can be found at: http://apa.sagepub.com/content/62/4/657

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APAXXX10.1177/0003065114547637Robert S. WallersteinErik Erikson and His Problematic Identity

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Robert S. Wallerstein

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Erik Erikson and His Problematic Identity In his psychohistorical biographies of Luther and Gandhi, Erik Erikson proposed that great issues of a particular time and place, as experienced by sensitive and creative individuals who are working to resolve their inner conflicts within these contexts, could find solutions that transcend themselves and yield conceptualizations that transform the world. Although Erikson was able to create a conceptualization of the adolescent task of establishing a coherent identity, one that gave voice to the aspirations and frustrations of the rebellious student movements of the 1960s, he was never able, over his lifetime, to resolve his own identity issues. Was he Dane or German, American or Scandinavian, Jew or Christian or both? His lifelong back-and-forths on this struggle are chronicled.

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he publication of Young Man Luther in 1958 clearly established Erik Erikson as a modern architect of the literary genre we know as psychohistory (a word coined in our time by Isaac Asimov) or psycho biography. This genre linked the great issues and struggles of the socio political surround, or at least the closer issues of individual tribe and family, on the one hand, with the embroilment of sensitive and creative individuals within those contexts, working to transcend their inner prob lematics to arrive at a liberating and productive resolution. Yet, though Erikson’s lifelong identity indecisions—foremost, is he Jew or Christian?— have been well known and variously remarked on, as in biographies by Roazen (1976) and Friedman (1999), among others, no one, as far as I know, has sought to directly link his ambivalence and nonresolution regarding his own identity formation with his professional preoccupation with the young adult developmental task of coherent identity formation; Emeritus Professor and former chair, Department of Psychiatry, UC San Francisco School of Medicine; Emeritus Training and Supervising Analyst, San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Submitted for publication April 9, 2014. DOI: 10.1177/0003065114547637 Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at LOUISIANA STATE UNIV on August 25, 2014

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the time-outs of this process in the adolescent moratoria that became so widespread in various forms in the student upheavals of the 1960s and beyond; and, for some young adults, their unhappy identity diffusions. As someone who became a close friend and professional colleague, and spoke with Erik at least weekly over the decade and a half (1973–1985) when he worked in the psychiatry department of Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, where many conversations hinted at aspects of his identity struggles, I am writing here my version of what I feel to be a central issue for Erik: namely, how his own struggles over identity must have played a prominent role in the reformulation of his issues as a universal dynamic—a dynamic that gave voice to the aspirations and frustrations of the rebellious student embroilments of the 1960s and made Erik an almost mythic spokes man for the widespread struggles of that coming-of-age generation. But first, let me indicate what I feel to be my warrant for undertaking this task. I first heard of Erikson in 1950,when I was a psychiatric resident at the Menninger Foundation School of Psychiatry in Topeka. One day one of my teachers and mentors, Rudolf Ekstein, excitedly informed me that a great book had just been published, one that opened up vast new vistas in our field, and that I must read it. It was Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1950a). I read it and was very taken with it. I decided to keep my eye out for his further writings. I did not actually meet Erik, however, until September 1964. I had just arrived as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, California, on a sabbatical year from my post as Director of Research at the Menninger Foundation. There were about fifty Fellows at the Stanford Center from around the world, most from the United States. It turned out that Erik Erikson was one of them and that his study was next door to mine. He had just recently come back from a long visit in Ahmedabad, India, and was now undertak ing the Gandhi book (Gandhi’s Truth, 1969). We and our wives became friends. My wife, Judith, and I, organized a seminar of seven or eight other interested Fellows, along with Erik, that met one evening a month at one of our homes, to read and critique chapters of that book as they were being written. It was a remarkably stimulating series of meetings. After that year we each returned to our settings: Erik to Harvard and I to Menninger. We occasionally wrote to each other. In 1972, when I was Chief of Psychiatry at Mt. Zion, I heard that Erik had come to retirement age at Harvard, and that when he submitted his resignation to the presi dent, as I understood the Harvard protocol to be, it was, to widespread

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Erik Erikson and His Problematic Identity

dismay, accepted, and Erik’s Harvard years were over. He was then living again in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he had spent the 1950s on the staff at Austen Riggs. I knew that he had close friends of long standing here in the Bay Area (notably, Tom and Marty Procter, neighbors of mine here in Belvedere) from his decade-long period (the 1940s) in the San Francisco Bay Area, as a faculty member in the department of psychology at UC Berkeley, and that his second son, Jan, was living here, working at a local repertory theater. So I contacted Erik asking if he and Joan would consider returning to the Bay Area if I could raise the money to offer him (and possibly Joan as well) part-time positions at Mt. Zion—he in a teach ing role for our students in the various mental health professions and Joan in re-creating on our inpatient ward the kind of arts-oriented activities program she had pioneered in the fifties at Austen Riggs. Erik wrote back indicating their real willingness. I sought grant sup port from foundation executives I knew and secured a positive response from Philip Hallen, president of the Maurice Falk Medical Fund in Pittsburgh, who wrote that though their charter limited them to biomedi cal and mental health research in the Pittsburgh area, he would make an exception in this instance, because the honor of having Erik Erikson—at the time a major American cult figure—in his “stable” would be adequate justification. So it came to pass that in 1973 the Eriksons moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, actually to a home within a mile of mine, and began their involvement with our Mt. Zion programs. Erik taught our psychiatric residents, our clinical psychology and psychiatric social work interns, and our students in our fledgling Doctor of Mental Health (DMH) program. The DMH was a five-year experimental mental health program combining the relevant elements of the training programs in the three standard mental health disciplines into what we expected to be optimal training for the care of the mentally and emotionally ill, a program com prising the three pillars of mental health care: psychotherapy, psycho active drug employment, and hospital management. For those in this DMH program Erik became the much idealized guru of their training experience. Joan also began to work on our inpatient unit, introducing and monitoring her arts program, as distinct from the conventional type of occupational therapy programs, with our psychiatric inpatients. Thus began a fifteen-year stay for the Eriksons in the Bay Area, dur ing which I, or Judy and I, saw Erik, or Erik and Joan, at least weekly, as increasingly close personal and professional friends. We regularly went to


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the theater or other events together, and I did orthopedic exercises for my arthritic back each Saturday morning for an hour under Joan’s rigid tute lage in their small, but heated, swimming pool, all year long no matter what the weather. After this weekly ritual I would have coffee and cookies with Erik in their kitchen, talking over personal and professional concerns and cares for another hour—or more. Over this span of years, it was through our seemingly endless togethernesses, and our unfailing close ness and solid candor, that I feel I came to know Erik, his persona, his mind, and his thinking maybe as well, or perhaps better, than most of his other close friends and colleagues over his lifetime. That equipped me, I think, as well as anyone else he had known, to undertake the task I have set for myself here: to articulate the dialectical imbrication of his lifelong identity struggles with his fashioning, for the youth of the world, the essential aspiration of a developed and consolidated personal identity, including the various perils along this path. I should add that all that I will say here is from the best of my memory, now in 2013, nineteen years after Erik’s death in 1994, supplemented by statements from writings about him (Friedman 1999: Roazen 1976: Wallerstein and Goldberger 1998). Erik’s mother was Karla Abrahamsen, from a comfortable upper middle class Jewish family in Copenhagen, with generations of forebears there that included a chief rabbi but also, surprisingly, a Lutheran pastor. Sometime in 1901 she became pregnant, the oft-told story being that the pregnancy resulted from a drunken one-night stand with an unknown Danish sailor, though there seemed also to be a story involving a wealthy and artistic Danish aristocrat. But whoever the father, when it became clear that she was pregnant and was beginning to show, Karla’s family impressed on her that she needed to get out of Copenhagen, and out of Denmark, to have the baby elsewhere to avoid the scandal an illegitimate birth would have caused in the turn-of-the-century social world of Victorian Copenhagen. Karla left for Germany, where Erik was born in Frankfurt on June 15, 1902. By 1905, when Erik was three, Karla had moved to Karlsruhe, further south in western Germany. There she became involved with and married Erik’s pediatrician, Theodor Homburger. Her husband adopted Erik, giv ing him his name (until 1939)—Erik Homburger. Homburger’s was an intensely Jewish, petit bourgeois family. He was a leader in the Jewish community, and for several years was president of the local synagogue, where he took Erik quite regularly. This was very important to Homburger;

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less so to the somewhat indifferent Erik. At the public school he attended, Erik was one of the few Jewish students and was regularly called “the Jew” by his classmates, but at the synagogue, where he would go with Dr. Homburger, his blond hair and blue eyes and his striking Scandinavian features—especially his profile—led the other children to call him “the Goy.” Thus was being fashioned Erik’s identity issues, not made easier by his devotedly Jewish mother imbuing him from early on with her passion for Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher and man of letters. Erik had a regular bar mitzvah but felt himself less and less involved in such a Jewish household—kosher, celebrating all the Jewish holidays, regularly attending the synagogue. Two daughters, Ruth and Ellen, were born to the Homburgers. Upon graduating from the Gymnasium, with no educational or career plans, Erik saw himself as perhaps an itinerant artist and undertook his Wanderjahr, much of it spent drawing in Italy. (The Wanderjahr was a widespread custom at that time for those who could afford it or chance it.) I have a woodcut of his in my home, signed simply, Erik, and dated 1922. It is a black and white piece, of a mother’s face and upper body, cradling a child, and reminiscent in many ways of the work of Albrecht Dürer. Erik told me at one time that he never became a serious artist because he felt he could not master color. From my perspective, he certainly had an at least moderate talent, and when he and I would be looking at his hand written manuscripts during our years together, they would often be adorned with sketches, usually of people’s heads, but at times still lifes and nature scenes. Sometime during his Wanderjahr, Erik received a letter from his closest boyhood friend, Peter Blos (not Jewish), who himself later became a distinguished psychoanalyst, his work focusing on adolescent develop ment and its psychological issues. Blos had, at that time, a teaching job in a Vienna school and wrote to Erik that there was a position for another teacher that he could apply for. The school was a private elementary school, created and endowed by Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham, heiress to the Tiffany fortune, divorced and with four children, who had come to Vienna with her children to undertake psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud. There she created the school for her own children and for those of members and patients of the psychoanalytic community that was gather ing around Freud. Burlingham became a close friend of Anna Freud (and the entire Freud family) and herself became a distinguished child analyst,


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the close partner of Anna Freud. She stayed with the Freud household through all the years of their Vienna stay, and in 1938 moved with them to London, where she continued living in the Freud household after Sigmund’s death, just with Anna Freud, until her own death. When Erik came to work at the school in Vienna, he undertook psy choanalytic training as well, with Anna Freud his training analyst. He told me that he would sometimes complain playfully to her that he had really come to be analyzed by her father, “but all I got was you.” In Vienna he met Joan Serson, from a wealthy High Church family in Canada (her father was an Anglican minister), who in 1929 had come to the city to study modern dance, as well as art and at least one craft, bead making. The two met under romantic circumstances and were soon deeply involved with each other. Joan became pregnant, and at some point in 1930—six to eight months into the pregnancy, according to differing accounts—the couple decided to marry. They involved neither family, apprehensive about the serious misgivings each might have about this Jewish-Christian mixed marriage, and settled for three different wedding ceremonies spread over a span of time: an Anglican wedding; a civil wed ding, at which Dorothy Burlingham was a witness; and a Jewish wedding, for which the rabbi required of Joan a profession of her intent to convert to Judaism, which she assented to. She never took this seriously, however, and came to the wedding ceremony with a handbag full of the bacon and pork they had for their wedding repast that evening. Very soon thereafter, Kai, their first son, was born. His brother, Jan, was born not long after, and both were raised as Christians. Joan was never fully at ease with Erik’s involvement in psychoana lytic training, especially what she saw as the domineering presence of Anna Freud and the circle of women around her. When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, and his shadow was already cast over Austria, the Homburgers, anticipating the Anschluss to come, decided to leave Vienna. (At this point Erik was about to graduate from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute.) Erik, who liked to see himself as a Dane, decided they would move to Copenhagen, where he had many relatives in his mother’s large extended family. With Nazi Germany’s increasing persecu tion of the Jewish population, Erik’s half-sister Ellen left Germany to move to Haifa in British-mandated Palestine, either accompanied by, or followed by, her parents. In all the years I knew Erik so closely, he rarely mentioned this half-sister, still living in Haifa, now, Israel. And never by

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name. Indeed, I didn’t even know her name till I read it in the Friedman biography (1999). It was always just “my Jewish sister.” I have heard, however, that he visited her at least once on one of his many travels. The only other person I know who visited with her at her home in Haifa was my own daughter Amy, during the first of her extended stints working in Israel. That was in 1975; Amy was eighteen. When the Eriksons heard of Amy’s planned trip, it was Joan, not Erik, who gave her Ellen’s name and address in Haifa, and impressed on Amy her strong wish that she visit with Ellen while in Israel. Amy did so, for several hours, and was impressed by Ellen, a very tall and strong woman, gracious in manner. Erik was at the time seventy-three, his half-sister ten years younger. Nothing was said about Ellen’s Homburger parents, who were no longer alive. When Erik and Joan arrived in Copenhagen in 1933, he was very much welcomed, but despite strenuous efforts by his relatives and wellplaced individuals and officials who tried to intervene on his behalf, he could not secure a work permit. Despite his protestations about his bio logical parents, he was declared not a Dane. He was a German citizen, born in Germany, with his mother and his adoptive father living in Germany, still as German citizens. He spoke German and knew no Danish. When his final appeal was denied, Erik had to reluctantly give up his dream of life as a Dane, and he and Joan, with their children, moved that same year to the United States, to Boston, where Joan had relatives. After sojourns first in Boston and then in New Haven, where he was involved with Harvard and Yale and their psychoanalytic communities, he was awarded United States citizenship in 1939. At that point he identified his race on the application form as “Scandinavian.” At that point Erik changed his name, taking the surname Erikson, and becoming Erik Homburger Erikson. He explained this decision in various ways, in different contexts. He once told me (somewhat facetiously?) that it had to do with his son Kai’s complaint that he didn’t like the name Homburger, that too many schoolmates teased him, calling him a ham burger. Thus it was Kai who asked for the change of name. But in the very detailed Friedman biography (1999), Erik is quoted as telling the author that “every new American is offered the option to choose another family name,” that the combination of Erik with Erikson is “quite common among Scandinavians,” and that “the name Erikson was chosen by family and friends as befitting the descendants of an immigrant named Erik who had been born a Scandinavian” (p. 144). Still another story is that the change


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was suggested by two people unrelated to Erik, one of them the daughter of an Episcopal clergyman, with no imputed reason for this advice. In any case, whatever the complex of reasons and motivations, the name change was the formal statement of a new assumed identity: Erik, the son of Erik, a self-created identity, with no forebears, a man who created himself. The name change was marked successively over the decades by the different names his works appeared under: first Erik Homburger; after 1939, Erik Homburger Erikson; then Erik H. Erikson, the most widely known and frequently used over his professional lifetime; and, finally, Erik Erikson, all traces of Homburger, his Jewish adoptive father, at last erased. (I have never been able to verify this last myself, but at least one colleague has told me of it). The decade of the 1940s was spent for the most part teaching in the famed department of psychology at UC Berkeley. Immediately after World War II, he also created, together with a Jungian colleague and close friend, Joseph Wheelwright, a mental health clinic for returning veterans at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, where a psychoanalyst, Jascha Kasanin, was chief. The Eriksons lived in the San Francisco region through the decade of the forties, leaving only when, in 1950, Erik and most of his department at UC Berkeley were not reappointed because they refused to take a state-required loyalty oath, demanded in that era of cold-war anxiety, already shadowed by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Erikson (1950b) wrote a letter explaining why, though not a Communist, his obligations as a teacher, which required absolute free dom of expression of thought, would not allow him to submit to the required oath in order to teach. It is, to me, the most stirring statement I have ever read about the real meaning of academic freedom. It ends with the following declaration: “I would feel it difficult to ask my subject of investigation (people) and my students to work with me, if I were to par ticipate without protest in a vague, fearful, and somewhat vindictive ges ture designed to ban an evil in some magic way—an evil which must be met with much more searching and concerted effort. In this sense, I may say that my conscience did not permit me to sign the contract after having sworn that I would do my job to the best of my ability” (p. 118). I knew nothing about Erikson until that time: 1950, the very year my mentor Rudolf Ekstein had made me aware of a new book, Childhood and Society, by an author whose name was new to me, Erik H. Erikson.

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Over the fifteen years that we saw each other so regularly, socially and professionally, talk was rarely about religion. It was not often that Erik would make references like the one to “my Jewish sister.” On one occasion, however, he asked me directly, “How come you Jews yearn so longingly for the coming of the Messiah and don’t realize that the Messiah has already come?” We also knew that there was nothing Jewish about the Eriksons’ home or their life. They had no temple affiliation, the house was not kept kosher, and I did not see any other observance of Jewish custom or ritual. Judy and I were both present at a particularly puzzling occasion for us. Joan was strongly involved in St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in the small San Francisco suburb where we and the Eriksons both lived, a church that Joan attended regularly. Joan was strongly attached to the Episcopal priest, John Thornton, a young, somewhat charismatic and very ecumenical and likable man. We knew Thornton quite well, as our daughter Amy was a member of his coed adolescent church group, and spent a summer vaca tion going as a member of that group on a tour of English cathedrals— Winchester, Salisbury, Wells, etc.—being lectured to by the rectors and sleeping at night on the floors of those splendid Gothic structures. Erik especially liked Thornton, considering him “hospitable toward my kind,” and would on occasion honor Joan’s request that he join her at a Sunday church service “to affirm and to receive affirmation from the ritual affirmations of a devotional community” (Friedman 1999, p. 439). Erik “lectured to St. Stephen’s Torah and Gospel group on Kierkegaard, played one of the three Wise Men in the parish’s Christmas pageant, and participated in the liturgical dance program. At Thornton’s urging, Erik took communion with Joan at a special ceremony at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco to honor a monk whom she admired. Communion required baptism or, in this case, presumably the pretense of baptism” (p. 439). I never knew the extent of Erik’s participation with Joan in her church attendance at St. Stephen’s, but Judy and I were present at the ceremony at Grace Cathedral. The young monk was being ordained on this special occasion, and Joan, who was very fond of him, had choreographed and taught him a dance, almost half an hour long, in which the long belt of his Dominican ordainment robe was fashioned into an integral component of the performance. The Eriksons invited us to participate at this special event, which was held under the auspices of the Episcopal bishop of San Francisco. After the vividly impressive dance performance, and the cere mony of induction into his monkhood, there was a regular Episcopal


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Church service. When parishioners went up to take communion, Judy and I were startled to see Erik go up with Joan. We thought we knew that only those baptized in that faith were authorized to take communion, and we had never heard that Erik had been baptized. Apparently neither had others, as witness Friedman’s remark, “or . . . presumably the pretense of baptism.” Yet another source has informed me that all those present at Episcopal services are invited to participate in communion whether bap tized or not, and Erik was indeed invited to participate by the friendly minister. These same back-and-forths about his identity that I have reported have of course been noted by others. According to Friedman (1999), when Erikson would be asked, during discussions at Austen Riggs in the 1950s, whether he was Jewish, he tended to reply “partly so” (p. 265). And during the Harvard years, the 1960s, when the question did he con sider himself Jewish or Christian arose, he might answer, “If you are antiSemitic, I’m a Jew” (p. 315), the retort essentially halting the inquiry. He might also indicate that by Nazi Germany’s dictates, he would be consid ered “eligible for Auschwitz.” But also during the Harvard years, a cruci fix was said to have hung on the wall of his Harvard office (Whitfield 2013, p. 2). Friedman’s overall judgment seems to be, “He noted that his whole childhood [I would say his whole lifetime] involved learning to navigate borders—between Judaism and Christianity, Denmark and Germany; mother, stepfather, and biological father” (1999, p. 42). Or take two other statements from Friedman: Erikson would not seek to bolster “one’s identity by the categorical exclusion and rejection of otherness” (p. 54); and perhaps even stronger: “In his later years . . . Erikson identi fied very closely with Jesus, the wandering rabbi at Galilee—the Jew who crossed new territory and launched Christianity” (p. 453). In describing his planned sequence of psychohistorical biographies to me, Erik once said that after Young Man Luther he was thinking of call ing the Gandhi book Middle-Aged Mahatma, to be followed finally by Old Man Ben-Gurion. The Gandhi book became, of course, Gandhi’s Truth, and the Ben-Gurion book was never written, though he expressed real interest in the man, who was retired from statecraft and from leading a new nation, finally residing in a kibbutz, Sde Boker in the Negev, as the philosopher sage of his people. Instead Erikson turned from Ben-Gurion to Jesus. He initially planned a book, but ended up writing a long paper on the Galilean wanderings and preachings of Jesus, “The Galilean

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Sayings and the Sense of ‘I’,” published in The Yale Review (1981), at the time edited by his son Kai. The review is a journal not often seen by psy choanalysts, but I have reprinted the essay as one of four seminal papers by Erik in the memorial volume I edited with Leo Goldberger. Goldberger, himself a Danish Jew who had come as an adolescent refugee to America, had looked forward very much, when Erik came in the 1950s to Austen Riggs, to talking with Erik in Danish and about Denmark. To the embar rassed chagrin of both, Erik had to confess that he did not know Danish. Leo and I put together Ideas and Identities: The Life and Work of Erik Erikson (Wallerstein and Goldberger 1998), following a memorial sym posium held in San Francisco after Erik’s death. At the same time he was writing his comprehensive biography of Erikson, Friedman also wrote an article for our volume in which he pre sented some of the harsh criticism that Erikson’s wavering over the iden tity issue had occasioned. “In March 1975,” he wrote, “Marshall Berman, a political theorist at City College (CUNY), struck what Erikson regarded as a . . . devastating blow. Reviewing Erikson’s Life History and the Historical Moment (1976) on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, he attacked Erik for concealing his Judaism. Berman also mocked the ‘cosmic chutzpah’ of his claim to be Erik Erikson, his own father, by repudiating his legal name of Erik Homburger in 1939 and renaming him self as his own son (the ultimate self-made man). Although Erikson had established his reputation by emphasizing the need to face honestly all personal identity issues, Berman claimed he was actually insecure and arrogant and could not face the problem of identity in his own life. Erikson was not what he seemed . . .” (Friedman 1998, p. 373). The attack occa sioned sharp responses in letters to the Times by a number of Erik’s col leagues and defenders. Perhaps Friedman’s far more tempered personal judgment can be gleaned from two snippets from the same article: (1) “Erikson the DanishGerman-American Jew turned Protestant” (p. 364); (2) “Intellectuals and scholars. . . . have asserted that he had gradually broken from psycho analysis (the ‘Jewish science’) in all essentials and become a Christian existentialist” (p. 354). Pace Friedman, I don’t feel that Erik ever broke away from psychoanalysis. To the end, he lived in it. In a much earlier, and shorter, biography of Erikson, Erik H. Erikson: The Power and Limits of Vision (1976), Paul Roazen, who as a Harvard student had been in Erik’s human development course, dealt with these


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same issues in a more limited, but equally uncertain and contradictory way. He states that “Erikson says his stepfather came from an ‘intensely Jewish small bourgeois family’” (p. 95) and that “Erikson is now a believ ing Christian” (p. 95), but on the next page remarks that “Erikson has not described his conversion to Christianity” (p. 96). Then, on the very next page, Roazen quotes Robert Coles, another biographer and a younger col league and friend of Erikson’s: “In Coles’s book, Erikson says that he considers ‘some of the Jewish elements in psychoanalysis ancestral in my work’” (pp. 96–97). But Roazen sets this against: “One has to remain skeptical when Erikson is reported by Coles to have said: ‘Jewishness as such has meant little to me’” (p. 96). Another younger colleague and close friend of Erik’s, who also con tinually looked at Erik’s inner identity struggles and his efforts to square his march toward Christianity with the pull of the Jewishness central to his childhood, has been the intensely Jewish Robert Jay Lifton at Yale, who has spent his career studying the inner worlds of extreme and grossly aber rant behavior (e.g., Chinese “thought reform,” Nazi doctors in the extermi nation camps, America’s atrocity-involved Vietnam War soldiers’ souls). Lifton organized and chaired annual two-week Wellfleet seminars on Cape Cod, built each year around Erikson’s central intellectual preoccupations. On a visit to Erik here in California, Lifton could wryly elicit perhaps Erik’s most soothing self-resolution of his identity dilemma. Lifton told this story: With the two of them sitting around Erik’s swimming pool, Erik suddenly said: “‘Bob, tell me something. Have you heard about these ‘Jews for Jesus?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’ve heard of them, Erik. They are a group of Jews who were born again in Christian fashion and are strongly attracted to Jesus.’ Then I thought I would be a little mischievous and asked him in return, ‘Anyhow, Erik, which side are you on?’ He then laughed a little, thought a little, and said ‘Both, of course’” (Lifton 1998, p. 99). This is my documentation of this central dilemma in a close col league’s life after fifteen years of real togetherness. Toward the end of his California years, Erik was slowly fading, both physically and mentally. His hearing was becoming significantly impaired. When the four of us would be driving home from the theater, Joan, Judy, and I would be explaining the play we had just seen together, Erik not having caught all the themes or all the dialogue. He kept taking on speaking chores when I felt he no longer should have, and Joan would always then participate, speaking up for Erik when he faltered. I became more and more his shield

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against professional requests he was not fully up to, indicating what and how he could gracefully decline—which he would then usually do. He returned to Harvard, a house in Cambridge in 1987, and a parttime position created for him of seminars on his lifetime themes: psycho social development; the cog-wheeling of generations; and the struggle for coherent adolescent identity formation, or unhappy crisis and possible diffusion, with perhaps a saving adolescent moratorium. These seminars were jointly available to psychiatry residents and divinity school students. Judy and I visited with the Eriksons in Cambridge, and then again later, when his further decline led to placement in a nursing home in Harwich, on Cape Cod, near his beloved Cotuit, where the Eriksons had owned a summer home ever since their early Harvard days. After Erik’s death on May 12, 1994, we visited Joan, now living in Harwich, and she took us to his gravesite in a nearby churchyard, her church, where she expected to be buried alongside him. She had completed the Christianization of Erik H. Erikson, always her desire. The most comprehensive and thoughtful statement by Erik himself about his identity issues that I have come across over my professional lifetime is in a long letter written from Tiburon, California, on December 30, 1976, to Hope Curfman, a social worker at a school for autistic chil dren in Denver, for a workshop she led at the Montview Presbyterian Church in that city. The workshop was studying Erik’s ideas, and Mrs. Curfman had posed the question of his religious faith in a letter to him. Extended quotations from his letter, which he at one point calls “a little essay,” but only a small fraction of its content, follow: “Dear Mrs. Curfman, the season seems to be a good time to respond to a letter which, when it came, was put aside as too important to answer lightly. Early this year you wrote to me to tell me of your church group which was studying my ideas. You wrote, ‘Frequently the question is asked: Is Erikson a Christian?’ And you added, ‘of course, answering such a ques tion . . . depends on one’s definition and timing. Today I consider myself a Christian; tomorrow I may not; and yesterday I struggled with it. Each has his own definition, so I shall restate the question. Do you consider yourself to be a Christian?’” (Erikson 2000, p. 32). A fair amount past this opening paragraph, Erik went on with: “All right then: some passages in the Gospels—the Word made Flesh and the Child and the Kingdom—have always touched me and continue to con vey a creedal immediacy which to me is the simplest and deepest resource


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of a universal faith formulated in the Western world. To me, the shining newness, above all, of Jesus’ parables attests to the genuine presence of a singular man. His teachings are, of course, unthinkable without the ele mental steps of Judaism” (p. 32). After several paragraphs, Erik raised the opposite question: “But before I come to that [psychoanalytic-historical insight], let me ask you: You refer to my ‘mixed Jewish and Christian origins.’ Does your question imply another one, whether or not I consider myself a Jew? Yes, I went along to synagogue as a child, and I underwent Bar Mitzvah, the Jewish confirmation, at the proper age. But while I was touched by the rituals performed at home (such as Passover), the syna gogue services, at the time, impressed me as rather ritualistic perfor mances, and this probably because of their ‘reformed’ style. All this was part of a quiet alienation from my whole childhood setting, German and Jewish” (p. 33). This was followed after a few lines by: “Then, there was the gradual awareness (this was the family secret) that while my mother was a Danish Jewess, my father had been a Danish Gentile. Also, my mother was a faithful reader of Kierkegaard, and I early received from her a quiet and uncombative conviction that to be raised a Jew did not preclude a rever ence for the core values of Christianity. Later, personal fate removed me from my background, and world events destroyed it altogether. My mother and my stepfather died in Israel. Now to the point: I know that nobody who has grown up in a Jewish environment can ever be not-aJew, whether the Jewishness he experienced was defined by his family’s sense of history, by its religious observances, or, indeed, by the environ ment’s attitudes toward Jews” (p. 33). At this point Erik inserted a footnote, referencing something he had said to Robert Coles (1970). He had told Coles: “You rightly ask about the Jewish part of my background as an identity issue; my mother’s family was Jewish, but in Denmark baptism and intermarriage are old customs, so one of my ancestors (so she told me) was Chief Rabbi of Stockholm and another a church historian and pastor in Hans Christian Andersen’s hometown. I have kept my stepfather’s name as my middle name out of gratitude (there is a pediatrician in me, too) but also to avoid the sem blance of evasion” (p. 33). Some paragraphs later, Erik continued with: “And I do feel on occasion the need to participate with my wife, in a church service in order to affirm and to receive affirmation from the ritual formulations of a devotional

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community. My wife’s church is ministered by a clergyman singularly able to convey the basic terms of original Christianity; and he is hospitable toward my kind” (p. 33). This is then followed, after many lengthy para graphs by: “In conclusion, I want to quote to you a phrase which my wife used when I asked what she (who happens to be an Episcopal minister’s daughter) would say in response to your question. She said, ‘I would tell her that I am a Christian apprentice.’ I like this, because (as your own remarks indicate) it seems so much more important to recognize the frontier on which one is struggling for insight and commonality than to let oneself be totally committed to categories which— important as they are for the fac tual definition of one’s daily duties—foreclose one’s infinite search. Dear Mrs. Curfman, a trusting question deserves a precise answer. Instead, as I warned you I would, I am sending you a small essay. All these words—do they tell whether I ‘consider myself a Christian’? I would say ‘yes’ in the sense that in order to perceive and to study the living implications of Christ’s message, I am not only willing, but determined, to live on the shad owy borderline of the denominational ambiguities (whether natural or reli gious, political or professional) into which I seem to have been born” (p. 34). After a few more lines, Erik ends with thanking Mrs. Curfman for her inquiry and sending his season’s greetings to her and her study group. I have quoted from this letter at such length because I find it to be Erik’s most comprehensive and thoughtful statement about the identity issues he struggled with all his life. It is perhaps his most insightful con veying of his never having truly achieved the consolidated identity forma tion, with real resolution of internal conflicting forces, that he articulated so forcefully and persuasively as such an important—and formidable— goal in each individual’s growth and development through life’s succes sive stages. As he states, toward the end of this letter, he could never be committed to ready-made categories that would foreclose his own infinite search. I take him to mean his own (at least implicit) awareness that he himself never would personally achieve the fully consolidated and inte grated coherent identity formation that his own life-cycle writings (Erikson 1959) pose as the aspirational goal of the adolescent life stage. Which brings me to state, and seek to combat, the at least implicit normative bias that his life-cycle writings rest on: namely, that the series of developmental tasks posited by the eight (in his final writings, perhaps nine) life-cycle states on Erikson’s psychosocial developmental ladder, each pointing to an essential integrated capacity and achievement, carries


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the normative bias that any falling short of this full attainment represents a developmental inadequacy, with risk of deleterious psychological con sequences, and therefore a degree of failure at fully normal growth and maturation. A more realistic understanding would be that the psycho social developmental model is an idealized portrayal of universal targeted aspirations at each stage of life’s journey, which we, each of us, aim toward with varying degrees of success, thus marking our individually distinctive character configurations. In this sense, such struggle and aspiration is universal at each life stage, and the distance between achievement and aspiration for each of us is individual and distinct at each stage. For Erikson the gap between aspi ration and achievement seems large indeed for the adolescent task of identity consolidation. His psychological genius, for one, lies precisely in his ability, nonetheless, to articulate for all the developmental goals that make up the optimal life journey. His own very inadequate resolution of the vital adolescent task of coherent identity formation makes him just as human as the rest of us, and serves indeed as striking evidence that failure to fully achieve does nonetheless not preclude creating for the rest of us a vision that demarcates our universal human tasks and goals. All this stated, what I should say at this point is that all the statements and quotations, especially by Erik, that I have presented here are indeed well known by his close colleagues and friends, by people who have stud ied him and his ideas, by biographers who have written about him, and by severe critics. Except for those that come from my many years of close contact with him and his thinking, they are all part of the public record and public knowledge. None of this is new knowledge being put into print for the first time. What I trust is new, since to this point I have not seen it pre sented in print, is that the whole issue of Erik’s ever problematic, never clearly resolved, identity struggle is a clear demonstration of another of Erik’s central intellectual preoccupations and professional contributions: that the central issues of one’s family and social experiential surround (and for some highly unusual and historically important individuals—like Luther and Gandhi—the central issues of the larger sociocultural and political surround) are struggled with and transcended in especially sensi tive and creative individuals, into a comprehensive understanding and voice, pointing the path toward a resolution for the involved and troubled many. For Erik, his own uncertain and problematic identity formation pointed the way to the evolution of the aspirational path for the adolescent

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growing into adulthood, of a consolidated and coherent identity formation, with all the possibilities for malformation along the path, with perhaps a saving adolescent moratorium to ease the struggle (including the example of his own falling short in the task in his own life). This is certainly a central theme of two of Erik’s most important and valued books, Young Man Luther (1958), and Gandhi’s Truth (1969). These volumes, which have become founding pillars of the literary genre known as psychohistory or psychobiography, propounded the central proposition that the imbricating pressures of one’s personal or familial sociocultural surround, and the wider sociohistorical surround in the case of extraordinarily well-placed, sensitive, and creative individuals, can prod or enable such individuals to transcend these outside pressures and the turmoil that may have engulfed their personal involvements, into cre ative solutions pointing the road to better, more comprehensive, and inte grated solutions for a far wider universe of comparably struggling individuals. In Luther’s case, it was converting the widespread discontent and anguish in European Catholic Christianity of the time into the Protestant Reformation, which then swept much of Europe. In Gandhi’s case, it was converting the discontent of masses of individuals, struggling for freedom under the constraints of colonial oppression, into the doctrine and techniques of nonviolent resistance that would lead to the indepen dence of India, and would become a worldwide model that enabled the rise and ultimate success of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. And in Erik’s case, it was to convert the agonies and ambiguities of his own lifelong identity uncertainties into a clarion call to a generation of adolescents struggling worldwide during the turbulent student rebellions of the 1960s to establish, to whatever degree possible, a coherent identity formation and to avoid identity diffusion—a major marker of Erik’s cul tural and psychological contribution to our collective societal wisdom. It is this contribution—how one man’s profound inner issues can play such an important initiating role in the professional and intellectual work of formulating a path for the achievement of a successful integration of the similar issues of the many—that at this point I see as so evident, but that I feel has not been made explicit about Erik, so far as I know. It is this presentation of the imbrication of the struggles of the one, with the path for the achievements of the many, in the case of the intellectually and emotionally prepared individual, that I have chosen as the organizing theme of this essay: how Erik Erikson was in his own life himself a


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striking example of what he presented to the world in his works on Luther and Gandhi. I have a final personal note. When I undertook Erik’s obituary, writ ten for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1995), I said at the end, “In my own active adult and professional lifetime, I have been fortu nate enough to have worked closely with two individuals I feel to have been authentic geniuses. Erik was one of them. I loved Erik” (p. 175). I said this last knowing, I think, quite well Erik’s character quirks—we all have them—and having watched with sadness, and at times uneasiness, Erik’s problematic and unresolved struggle with his conflicted identity. But coming to see what he did to outline the path for resolution for the troubled many—what he did for them, for psychoanalysis, and for the culture of his time—deepens my feelings about his genius. References

Berman, M. (1975). Review of E.H. Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment. New York Times Book Review, March 30. Coles, R. (1970). Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work. Boston: Little, Brown. Erikson, E.H. (1950a). Childhood and Society. New York: Norton. Erikson, E.H. (1950b). A conviction born of judiciousness. In Ideas and Identities: The Life and Work of Erik Erikson, ed. R.S. Wallerstein & L. Goldberger. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1998, pp. 115–120. Erikson, E.H. (1958). Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Norton. Erikson, E.H. (1959). Identity and the Life Cycle: Selected Papers. Psychological Issues Monograph 1. New York: International Universities Press. Erikson, E.H. (1969). Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence. New York: Norton. Erikson, E.H. (1975). Life History and the Historical Moment. New York: Norton. Erikson, E.H. (1981). The Galilean sayings and the sense of I. In Ideas and Identities: The Life and Work of Erik Erikson, ed. R.S. Wallerstein & L. Goldberger. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1998, pp. 277–321. Erikson, E.H. (2000). Erikson on his own identity. DoubleTake, Fall, pp. 32–34.

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Friedman, L.J. (1998). Erik H. Erikson’s critical themes and voices: The task of synthesis. In Ideas and Identities: The Life and Work of Erik Erikson, ed. R.S. Wallerstein & L. Goldberger. Madison, CT: International Universities. Press, 1998, pp. 353–378. Friedman, L.J. (1999). Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson. New York: Scribner. Lifton, R.J. (1998). Entering history: Erik Erikson’s new psychological land scape. In Ideas and Identities: The Life and Work of Erik Erikson, ed. R.S. Wallerstein & L. Goldberger. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, pp. 99–114. Roazen, P. (1976). Erik H. Erikson: The Power and Limits of a Vision. New York: Free Press. Wallerstein, R.S. (1995). Obituary: Erik Erikson (1902–1994). International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76:173–175. Wallerstein, R.S, & Goldberger, L., eds. (1998). Ideas and Identities: The Life and Work of Erik Erikson. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Whitfield, S.J. (2013). Enigmas of modern Jewish identity. Jewish Ideas Daily, internet. 290 Beach Road Belvedere, CA 94920 E-mail: [email protected]


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Marcia and erikson: The relationships among ego identity status, neuroticism, dogmatism, and purpose in life.

Erik H. Erikson's contribution to ethics.

In memoriam Jan-Erik Edström (1931-2013).

Untapped richness in Erik H. Erikson's rootstock.

Problematic comparisons.

'Problematic methodology'.

Adler and His Psychology: Seen through His Early Memories.

Re: Bach and His.

Allison-And His Parents.

Draffin and his rods.

Biotech vaccines' problematic promise.

Man and his genes.

Bach and His.

Stress moderates the relationship between problematic Internet use by parents and problematic Internet use by adolescents.

Engelmann and his laddergram.

Problematic Internet use and physical health.

Diplopia and driving: a problematic issue.

Problematic Internet Usage and Immune Function.

Passion for Academics and Problematic Health Behaviors.

Eating disorders and IDDM. A problematic association.

Correction: Problematic Internet Usage and Immune Function.

Louis Joblot and his microscopes.

Precision medicine--personalized, problematic, and promising.

"His turn".