A Review of Ideas and Identities: The Life and Work of Erik Erikson: Robert S. Wallerstein and Leo Goldberger. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1998, 411 pp.; and Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson by Lawrence J. Friedman. New York: Scribner, 1999, 592 pp.

Because I Find Erikson's writing as evocative, inspiring, and clinically useful as any in our field, these two books left me with a feeling of sadness. In the case of Ideas and Identities, the sadness is due to what Robert Wallerstein unflinchingly calls “the psychoanalytic limbo into which Erikson's life work, magisterial as it is, has fallen” (p. 21). It is a limbo from which these essays, interesting as they are and including, as they do, some of Erikson's own best papers, are unlikely to rescue him. No amount of specifying how much Erikson anticipated contemporary thinking can restore to him the currency he has lost. American psychoanalytic history has been told differently, for the most part, and different lineages and loyalties are now in place. My sadness in the case of historian Lawrence Friedman's uninspired biography comes from his carefully documenting, even accentuating, the long years of Erikson's decline. These were years in which his physical and intellectual deterioration were paralleled by his steeply waning significance on the American intellectual scene, where he had achieved more renown than he ever had in strictly psychoanalytic circles. These declines, as psychoanalytic theorist and as cultural eminence, are worth pondering. I focus here more on his decline within psychoanalysis.

Wallerstein and Goldberger's volume builds around five papers from a 1995 San Francisco symposium celebrating the range of Erikson's contributions to various disciplines.

Marcia Cavell offers some thoughts on Erikson's contribution to philosophy. She discusses the contribution of the stage of “autonomy versus shame and doubt” to the development of mind and self.

Neil Smelser provides a thoughtful overview of Erikson's relation to social sciences generally, and to anthropology and history in particular. He sees Erikson as the “quintessential interdisciplinarian,” always working