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Some 50 years ago when I finished the training at the British Institute of Psychoanalysis I was asked to choose two books: this was from the Sylvia Payne bequest made to welcome students when we joined the ranks of qualified psychoanalysts (Sylvia Payne was a distinguished psychoanalyst and former President of the British Society). She interviewed me when I applied for training and I treasure the memory of her saying, ‘You do realize, Dr Pines, that psychoanalysis is a very sedentary profession’. The relevance of this anecdote is that my two books were Erikson's Childhood and Society and Marjorie Brierley's Trends in Psychoanalysis, thus showing the range of my interests!
Childhood and Society had made a deep impression, widening Freud's phases of psychosexual development into psychosocial ones and incorporating anthropology and sociology into psychoanalytic theory. Erikson's schema of epigenetic development was meat and drink to me, as I was already deeply influenced by the group analytic paradigm created by my training analyst S.H. Foulkes, who like Erikson had trained in Vienna in the 1920s.
However, I did not closely follow Erikson's later work on Luther, Gandhi, his writings on insight and responsibility and his further reflections on identity.
I was privileged to meet Erikson when I organized and chaired a panel on the Freud/Jung correspondence at the London International Congress of Psychoanalysis in 1975 where the other panellists were Masud Khan and the eminent Jungian Michael Fordham. I well remember Masud Khan exploding with anger when a member of the audience dared to raise the question of whether Freud had had a sexual relationship with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays, so it is a signal coincidence that Burston has written an article in the last issue of Psychoanalysis and History which tends to confirm that relationship (Burston 2008).
Burston and I had some correspondence when he was writing on R.D. Laing although I do not now remember whether we actually