Kushner reviews Erikson's contributions to psychohistory, considering how his own psychoautobiography perhaps influenced his psychohistorical studies, and noting that his own identity crisis remained elusive even to Erikson himself. Feeling that Erikson's understanding of identity was influenced by the American myth of cultural assimilation, the author also analyzes Erikson's rejection of his father's past and culture as reflecting an identity crisis of his own. Kushner concludes that the plastic nature of identity in Erikson's thought (not unlike the identity of young man Luther) perhaps represents his own lifelong search for and construction of his own identity. Observing that Erikson based his studies upon an idiosyncratic version of ego psychology, rather than on a differential diagnosis rooted in object relations theory, Kushner notes that, for Erikson, failure in following the eight-stage order became synonymous with neurosis, and that he neglected the importance of the group and culture