'Observations on the Yurok: Childhood and World Image.': Erik Homburger Erikson. University of California Publications in American Archæology and Ethnology, 1943, Vol. 35, No. 10, pp. 257–302.

Erikson uses his method of linking a chosen cultural setting with definite patterns of childhood training. He first studied the Sioux Indians in this way and now investigates the Yurok tribe in California. The Sioux baby is nursed long and generously enough to acquire a basic feeling of being provided for and loved—a memory of which is a prerequisite of cultural striving. In contrast to Sioux training, the Yurok child is weaned early, well before he is one year old and is encouraged to early locomotor activity. The tendency to wean already starts, so to speak, before birth, when the mother by certain behaviour discourages the unborn child 'from resting too comfortably against the mother's spine'. An outspoken character trait of the Yurok is his nostalgia, and in the Yurok myths the father-god created the world by crying. Yurok songs in their content as in their phonetics seem to be cries of hunger and helplessness, of desire and longing, intermingled with 'hallucinatory wishfulfilment' and differ strikingly from the martial cries of the Sioux. It is significant that the Yurok chooses food carefully to avoid contamination, chews slowly and, most important of all, subordinates oral craving to the craving for wealth. The life of the Yurok centres around the life of the salmon, which, so far as the Yurok knows, never eats; its sexual development leads to loss of strength and death. It is sent on its yearly run by the Father 'beyond the ocean'. Through such a phantasy the Yurok achieves a miracle: 'to eat his salmon and have it next year too'.