Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (review)

Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson. By Lawrence J. Friedman (New York, Scribner, 1999) 592 pp. $35.00

Friedman has written an exemplary psychobiography of the master of the genre. Although Friedman avoids reducing Erikson's life to a simple theme, a recurring motif is Erikson's own effort to define himself as he develops the "psychosocial" concept of identity.

Born in Germany to Karla Abrahamsen and an absent father whom he never knew, Erikson was given his biological father's first name and (at age nine) his stepfather's surname, Homburger. Upon gaining United States citizenship as an adult, he renamed himself Erik Homburger Erikson, in honor of his unknown father and his own penchant for self-definition. This reinvention has been noted before, but Friedman's biography provides essential details, shows its dynamics in all their subtlety, and links it to Erikson's lifetime of boundary crossing and bridging of disciplines, religions, countries, languages, and generations.

The author had the cooperation of Erikson (before his death), as well as of his colleagues and family, most notably his wife and collaborator Joan. Providing both drama and detail, the narrative is based on scores of interviews, family papers, and archives in the United States and Europe. Thanks to Friedman's blending of the personal, social, and intellectual, Erikson's writings and lectures gain new value, both illuminating his life and emerging from it. In Young Man Luther (New York, 1962), for example, Erikson portrayed Martin Luther's childhood as influenced by surrogate fathers and his mother's loving voice--Erikson's own experience. Where Erich Fromm stressed Luther's antisemitism and authoritarianism, Erikson, the optimist, shows him marshalling his inner resources to create a new identity and usher in a new historical period.

Revealed in this work are the many problems posed by Erikson as a biographical subject. First, is his own autobiographical writing--self-analysis based on his psychosocial concepts. Not only does it threaten to preempt the biographer's domain, but its variability and contradiction make it difficult to build upon. Equally challenging are the family secrets that seem to contradict the Eriksonian paradigm and persona (the latter created by Joan and Erik Erikson). These include the Eriksons' son with Down's Syndrome who was hidden from siblings and the public, and Erik's signing of a Joseph McCarthy-era loyalty oath which he had famously denounced. Also of note are Erikson's aloofness from his family in times of crisis and from the social-temporal world that his theories celebrate, as well as the conflict between Erikson's eight-stage theory of human development and his own apparent six-stage life.

A lesser biographer might have resolved these conflicts by attacking Erikson's theories and his personal integrity. Such has been the fate of Bruno Bettleheim and Carl Jung at the hands of recent biographers. ¹ Instead, Friedman uses these contradictions to illustrate the flexibility of Erikson's theories and the protean qualities of his life. In doing so, he rejects psychological and historical reductionism and adopts Erikson's "disciplined subjectivity" to understand this cartographer of the human psyche in the post-Holocaust era.

Benjamin Harris
University of Wisconsin, Parkside

Note

1. Richard Pollak, The Creation of Dr. B.: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim (New York, 1997); Richard Noll, The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (New York, 1997).

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