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

Lawrence J. Friedman. Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson. Introduction by Robert Coles. New York: Scribner, 1999. 592 pp. Ill. $U.S. 35.00; $Can. 52.00.

Lawrence J. Friedman's comprehensive and engaging biography of the American psychoanalyst and prophetic cultural critic Erik H. Erikson is organized around a suggestive paradox: the man who delineated identity as a protean concept that would appeal, in the 1960s and 1970s, to everyone from revisionist psychoanalysts to college students in search of authentic selfhood, was a man fated, by the accident of his birth to a single mother who never divulged the name of the man who had abandoned her, to be forever in search of the most fundamental dimension of his own identity, the name of his father. Born in 1902, in Frankfurt, Germany, Erikson first was given the surname, Homburger, of the pediatrician his mother married several years after his birth. Emigrating to the United States in 1933, he gradually shed this patently Jewish name and, exemplifying what he would later characterize as the American penchant for self-invention, took the name Erikson as he filed for citizenship in 1938. A fatherless immigrant, who envisioned himself a racial and religious mixture--his father, he believed (though never proved), was a Danish aristocrat of artistic bent--and thus echt American, Erikson in this fantasy of rebirth became father to himself, like the paradigmatic immigrant child, "his own parent and master" (p. 180).

It would be difficult to exaggerate the centrality of identity in the long cultural moment we remember as the sixties. Erikson, though analyzed by Anna Freud and steeped in orthodox psychoanalysis, broke with the psychoanalytic mainstream, arguing that it was as important to attend to what he called the outer world as to the inner life. Drawn to the work of the early ego psychologists, he found in several of them an interest in selfhood and identity that resonated with his struggles to find meaning in his own existence. Friedman provocatively suggests that it was Erikson's fatherless condition that necessarily rendered the classical analysts' Oedipal struggle--a struggle between father and son--less central to his psychoanalytic vision than the "personal quest for self-discovery" to which the concept of identity, in his hands, would refer (p. 95). In the mid-1940s, working with veterans, formerly "normal" men newly bereft of a sense of sameness and continuity in their lives, he coined the term "identity crisis" to capture their--and his own--feelings of loss. With the publication of Childhood and Society in 1950, which with great acuity and writerly grace situated the ego and its development in a range of cultural and historical sites, Erikson entered the ranks--alongside David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd (1950)--of the American century's most perceptive and popular social critics. Within a decade, he was very much a public figure, a social prophet whose writings on the crisis of identity spoke compellingly to a generation for whom "finding oneself" became a cultural imperative. Erikson's brand of ego psychology usefully brought the public and private selves within the same analytic compass, appealing especially to those for whom personal was political. Psychohistorical treatments of Luther and Gandhi, and a sort of secular sainthood, followed--but so did criticism, from all sides. By the 1970s, historians were disenchanted with his history. Psychoanalysts were finding him insufficiently analytic, his work of little clinical use. Feminists were, at the same time, charging him with being too much the heir to what they argued was Freud's biological determinism. By the mid-1970s, the Eriksonian moment had passed.

Friedman's biography weaves together the personal and intellectual threads that defined Erikson's life. He situates his subject in a variety of settings, from Vienna to New Haven to Berkeley. He provides thorough synopses of the published work, and traces its reception by...