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14  february 15, 1997 Like a Hebrew prophet, Erikson was insisting upon psychological investigation as a moral calling. D uringthelate1960sthepsychoanalystErikH.Eriksontaughtan immensely popular undergraduate course at Harvard College. He used some of his own suggestive, edifying essays, but he also encouraged those of us who helped him teach as section leaders to use novelssuchasInvisibleMan,orshortfiction,suchasFlanneryO’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “The Displaced Person,” “The Lame Shall Enter First.” We’d meet with him every week to talk about the way things were working out in the class, and often we’d wander in our discussions—take advantage of the privileged opportunity we had to be with him for a couple of hours by putting questions to him, thereby telling him of our various interests and concerns. We kept addressing the subject of psychoanalysis in those discussions —its nature and purpose, of course, but also its relationship to a secular culture in which it had so obviously prospered. Erikson would remind us repeatedly of the irony—that a nation Freud himself both misunderstood and disliked (probably the former accounting for the latter) had become the virtual homeland of his discipline, the country where it was most fully accepted and where the majority of its practitioners did  15 their work. Not that we had a hard time speculating on the reasons for that development. We kept on mentioning the materialism that prevailed in America—the preoccupation so many of us have with “goods and services,” with ownership of various kinds, and, not least, with ourselves as a commodity of sorts: our appearance, our presentation of ourselves as decisive matters in determining our personal, social, and even occupational destiny. I can still hear Erikson helping us walk through such a level of thinking; I can still remember his pointed, penetrating comments as he did so. “You have to remember,” he once told us, “that Freud was using psychoanalysis to learn more and more about the mind, not to help his patients ‘adjust’ to society.” Another time, he made the following observation , drawing on his own experiences as a young member of the so-called “Freud circle” in Vienna in the late 1920s and early 1930s: “Back then, psychoanalysis was attractive to a lot of us who were rebellious, unwilling to settle for the status quo. Now, especially here [in America], it draws upon different candidates [aspirants for training].” He told us, in that regard, to go look up an important address Anna Freudhadjustgiven(in1968)attheNewYorkPsychoanalyticInstitute— and I obligingly did so. She had, indeed, reminded her listeners that a profession once meant to challenge all sorts of psychological and social notions of what is and ought to be had in a generation become very much the property of an upper-bourgeois world, its inhabitants thoroughly interested in maintaining their hold on power, authority, wealth. Face to face with her audience of attentive colleagues, she dared compare their situation as successful, much respected psychoanalytic psychiatrists with the “disbelief, the ridicule, the suspicions, and the professional ostracism to which the first generation of analysts were exposed.” She called those 16  early colleagues of her father’s “pioneers,” reminded those in attendance at that Eighteenth Freud Anniversary Lecture that their predecessors had “ignored the conventional restrictions of their time,” had been willing to risk “their social and professional status,” and, “last but not least, in many instances gave up secure and profitable careers for financial uncertainties and hardship.” Those words were a blunt challenge to a particular entrenched institutional life. Moreover, those words were not unlike the ones used by Erikson, her onetime analysand, in his epilogue to Childhood and Society, wherein he warns his readers that a psychoanalyst has to learn how to “discard archaic rituals of control,” learn a humane rationality, but above all, “set free in himself and in his patient that remnant of judicious indignation without which a cure is but a straw in the changeable wind of history.” Like a Hebrew prophet of the Old Testament, Erikson was insisting upon psychological investigation as, ultimately, a moral calling—otherwise, doctors and patients alike become all too pointlessly self-absorbed; and as the historian Christopher Lasch put it, they (we) slip into a “culture of narcissism.” As we mulled over such matters, Erikson was quick to remind us that not only medical or cultural institutions depart from their original mission, become the victims of success. “Think of the early Christians,” he urgedus,“andseewhatnowpassesinthenameofthereligiontheyfought so hard to establish.” Not a...

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