August 22, 1999

Psychoanalysis, American Style

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Unlike Freud, Erik Erikson tried to create a vision of psychological energy and health.

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Featured Author: Erik H. Erikson

First Chapter: 'Identity's Architect'

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By MARK EDMUNDSON

IDENTITY'S ARCHITECT A Biography of Erik H. Erikson. By Lawrence J. Friedman. Illustrated. 592 pp. New York: Scribner. $35.

any of the college students assigned to read Erik Erikson's most influential book, ''Childhood and Society,'' in the 1960's probably assumed that they were in the hands of an American-born writer. To be sure, ''Childhood and Society,'' like Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's ''Dialectic of Enlightenment'' and Herbert Marcuse's ''One Dimensional Man,'' excoriated conformity and alienation. And Erikson's book is hard on the American nuclear family, with its ineffectual dads and petty, controlling moms. But over all there's a smiling, upbeat quality, a ready hopefulness, that infuses his work from beginning to end and that sets him apart from most of the other influential European thinkers who had an impact on midcentury American intellectual life. Compared with the implacable Horkheimer and Adorno, Erikson has a nearly boosterish attitude.

Of Danish descent, Erik H. Erikson was born in Germany in 1902; he was educated there and in Austria, and arrived in America in 1933. He had no medical degree, and all through his career as both a therapist and a writer on psychoanalysis, thought of himself as something of an artist. He went through his training analysis with the Imperial Dowager of psychoanalysis herself, Freud's formidable daughter, Anna. And if he mastered any intellectual system, it was Sigmund Freud's. But as Lawrence J. Friedman, the author of ''Menninger: The Family and the Clinic,'' shows in his equable, impressively researched biography, there was something genially rebellious about Erikson's American adaptation of psychoanalysis. Freud notoriously detested America. Though arguably psychoanalysis caught on faster and struck deeper roots here than anywhere else outside Vienna, he never wavered in his attitude. He thought that Americans suffered from what he called ''the psychological poverty of groups.'' Americans were herd animals, unable to respond to the demands for improvement that the best sorts of leaders issued.

Erikson, though, seems to have loved America from the start. It's said that he left the immigration office whistling ''Yankee Doodle.'' To him, fleeing a Europe soon to be under Nazi control, the United States was the embodied spirit of freedom and opportunity, every hard-working immigrant's best second chance. And optimism of a recognizably American sort is evident throughout ''Childhood and Society,'' particularly in ''Eight Ages of Man,'' the chapter that was to become the cornerstone of his later work.

At each stage of life, Erikson argued, the ego is compelled to struggle to define itself against forces of degradation and inertia. Full use of the faculties, and a harmonious, unalienated spirit, are the goal. (Adorno, Erikson's fellow emigre, thought that truth could be apprehended only by a self-consciously alienated mind.) The major moment of self-integration comes, Erikson hypothesized, when the subject achieves durable identity, when his internal sense of self matches the way he is viewed by others in the world. At a certain moment in early adulthood, Erikson suggested, the ego has to become strong enough to resist ''role confusion,'' to map out a life's project and begin enacting it.

The identity crisis, well resolved, inaugurates the time when a person knows that his life is real, and that it has begun in earnest. In the life of Martin Luther, about whom Erikson would later write an influential biography, resolving the identity crisis entailed understanding the nature of conviction. Luther, Erikson observed, becomes himself when he learns ''The Meaning of 'Meaning It.' ''

The New York Times

Erik Erikson and his wife Joan at home in a 1988 photo. "The only thing that can save us as a species is seeing how we're not thinking about future generations in the way we live . . . What's lacking is generativity, a generativity that will promote positive values in the lives of the next generation. Unfortunately, we set the example of greed, wanting a bigger and better everything, with no thought of what will make it a better world for our great-grandchildren. That's why we go on depleting the earth: we're not thinking of the next generations." -- Erik H. Erikson, in an interview with Daniel Goleman from The New York Times, June 14, 1988. Featured Author: Erik H. Erikson

Though Erikson shrewdly did all he could to sustain his links with the psychoanalytic establishment back in Austria, his procedures eventually became suspect there. It was not only that he was such a rapid success among the American philistines: he acquired impressive academic appointments, prestigious lectureships and more patients than he could easily handle. It was that, from the vantage of Europe, he seemed to have dropped Freud's theory of the psyche and exchanged it for a comfier, more Americanized idea. To Freud, character was conflict. The psyche was always in a state of internal warfare. Erikson's identity theory implied that the main tension was the one between self and society, and that with sustained efforts the conflict could be resolved in favor of the individual. Erikson seemed to believe that the ego could simultaneously organize the drives, declaring relative internal peace, and put itself to work, satisfyingly, in the world.

Did this way of thinking about the self and self-development work for Erik Erikson himself? Besides giving us an intelligent, well-measured overview of Erikson's intellectual origins and achievements, ''Identity's Architect,'' with humane detachment, allows us to decide this question for ourselves.

Erikson the clinician was from all accounts what he hoped to be in all his endeavors, something of an artist. He was able to enter imaginatively into the sometimes strained, sometimes excruciating lives of his patients, to listen, to interpret and sometimes to lead them to relative psychological freedom. A horribly suffering schizophrenic girl learned from Erikson how to tell stories about each of her fingers (this one went to the store, this one cried all the way home, etc.), and with them to express herself a little and to make some contact, however diminished, with the world at large. It is hard to imagine the austere Freud employing such a trick, both childlike and efficacious.

Yet when the most disturbing moment in Erikson's rather serene life arrived -- the moment one might call his belated identity crisis -- he seems to have faltered rather badly. Erikson's last son, Neil, was a Down syndrome baby. Opinion at the time on how to deal with such children was divided. Many well-informed physicians were for institutionalization. But a man like Benjamin Spock, who later became quite close to Erikson, would have advised that Neil be brought up at home in the company of his family, as most any Down child, born to affluent circumstances, is today. The Eriksons opted for institutionalization.

But that's not the whole story. According to Friedman's account, Erikson and his wife conspired to inform the two younger siblings that Neil had died shortly after birth. (To their oldest child, Kai, they eventually told the truth.) For some time, as far as the two younger children knew, their brother, who was confined to an institution for his entire life, did not exist.

It is tempting to equate the way Erikson dealt with Neil with certain elements in his thought over all. From the perspective of more rigorous Freudians, you'll recall, Erikson never gave enough attention to the deep structure of the psyche, to the anxieties, drives, aggressions, loves and hates that consciousness has deemed forbidden and thus repressed. So Erikson, faced with a harsh truth in his personal life, chose to push it away, to do all he could to forget about it and to continue to wear the face of an American success. Or so one might glean from Friedman's account: such stories are always complicated, and about this matter there may be more to say.

hroughout his career, Erikson told relatively upbeat tales about how well the psyche could master itself and its environment, and go on to a life of relative satisfaction. Yet to those who believe in the darker side of the human self, those stories can sound thin, incomplete, maybe a touch opportunistic.

But Erikson shouldn't be written off quite so quickly. For he tried to do something of considerable value that Freud never fully succeeded in doing. Erikson tried to offer a psychoanalytically based portrait of human happiness. Freud evokes sanity -- his ideal -- often enough, but he elaborates on it too rarely, sketching it with the most evanescent lines (though, to be sure, Freud sought to dramatize a certain sort of sanity by the way he presented himself in his writings). Erikson, whatever his inadequacies, challenged psychoanalysis to create an explicit vision of the psyche in a state of full energy and genuine health. With his rich biography, which is likely to revive interest in Erikson and his project, Friedman brings that challenge once again to the fore.

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Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of ''Towards Reading Freud'' and ''Nightmare on Main Street.''

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