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Born in Israel, Burston grew up in Toronto and completed his doctorate at York University under the direction of Paul Roazen. I recall serving in the late eighties as one of the examiners at his defence of his thesis on Fromm, later published as the first of a series of publications on Fromm (1991) and Laing (1996, 2000)—critical responses to the controversial film The Passion of the Christ (Burston & Denova, 2005) and other topics. At the time, I confess I lacked the prescience to anticipate that he would develop over the next decade or so into a historian of psychoanalysis of the first rank. Erik Erikson and the American Psyche establishes him as, in addition, a perceptive psychoanalytic thinker in his own right, an important cultural critic or public intellectual, and an elegant and engaging writer.
Burston describes how Erikson's reputation and influence went into decline, after enjoying considerable celebrity both within and outside psychoanalysis, by the mid to late seventies, owing, in part at least, to a savage attack on his work and his character by Berman (1975). This was followed by a range of critiques by other authors, including Roazen (1976), whom Erikson failed to rebut adequately and from which he never quite recovered. Berman depicted Erikson as what Rycroft (1985) called a “father ablator” because he dropped his Jewish adoptive father's name (Homberger) for one that seemed to both deny his Jewishness and to imply self-creation (Erik Erik's son). Burston reviews all of this information in a balanced and sympathetic way, providing for this theorist of identity, identity crisis, and identity diffusion the biographical context insufficiently appreciated by Berman and other critics.
Drawing heavily on Friedman's (1999) authoritative biography, among other sources, Burston describes how Erikson's Jewish mother had lied to her son about his paternity (claiming Homberger as his father) and, when her lie was discovered, lied again (claiming as the father her