You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Erik Erikson, whose intellectual and spiritual home was at Austen-Riggs, wrote a remarkably modern essay which, although delivered in 1963 in India, still has significant contemporary impact (Erikson, 1964).
Man's socio-genetic evolution is about to reach a crisis in the full sense of the word, a crossroads offering one path to fatality, and one to recovery and further growth. Artful perverter of joy and keen exploiter of strength, man is the animal that has learned to survive “in a fashion,” to multiply without food for the multitudes, to grow up healthily without reaching personal maturity, to live well but without purpose, to invent ingeniously without aim, and to kill grandiosely without need. (p. 227)
It was Erikson's hope that insight and knowledge would help civilize mankind, reflecting the traditional hope of the early analytic enclave, beginning with Freud in his remarkable essay, “Civilization and Its Discontents” (Freud, 1930). Born as he was from the bedrock of the new science of the post Darwinian world, and excited by the sense of mission and fervor of his teachers, Freud's work embodied the “psycho-physical pledge.” Freud embraced science as his new religion hoping that it would humanize us in the way that Erikson, some 60 years later, continued to hope, more cynically. Freud criticized religion as having had enough time to civilize mankind over the past some 2000 years. Instead he believed that science should be at least given a try. Yet science has failed in less than a century. As we approach this millennium with the cool and crystal-clear mind of the analyst who does not wish to be caught up in the furor and irrationality of armageddon thinking, we must surely admit that the knowledge and insight Freud hoped would civilize us has not done so.