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This book, while making an important contribution
from psycho-analysis to social science, is at the same time a most welcome enrichment of psycho-analytic thought. The author draws on his work as a psycho-analyst, and especially as a child analyst, as well as on his experience in anthropological field work in this study of the warp and woof of childhood and society. Case material of children, American Indians and war casualties is illumined by psycho-analytic understanding of neurotic conflict.
Erikson demonstrates both the familiar and its reverse: that the individual's behaviour as a member of society is determined by childhood experiences, but also that these very experiences depend in their turn on the milieu in which they happen. They vary from culture to culture, from class to class. Certain events will only occur in certain cultural settings; a particular stress will only obtain in a particular environment. Such events and stresses are handled and solved in no arbitrary manner, but in the strict tradition of the community concerned.
In complete contrast to the views held in many psycho-analytic circles (in their most extreme form by the British child analysts in their emphasis on the child's early phantasy life), Erikson underlines the societal factors through which, from earliest childhood, we are each one of us trained to fit into our communal surroundings. It is not planned or scientific training, but instinctive; growing into the particular pattern prevalent in each community only through continuous trial and error, and through constant repetition of the bitter consequences of each false step. The pattern is imposed by forces which are part of and are diffused through the whole network of the communal body. Parents and teachers are therefore not consciously aware that the way in which they bring up their children is absolutely dependent on the dictatorial direction of communal forces.
The first part of the book is concerned with childhood and the