You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In concert with Lawrence Friedman's newly released biography of Erik Erikson,1 this loving tribute to the man and his work by an array of distinguished colleagues and friends took this reader down memory lane. Back in the 1960s, when I was a student and he a university professor at Harvard, Erikson reigned supreme as the silver-haired psychoanalytic folk hero of our generation. Though he found himself marginalized by his fellow analysts (despite his essential loyalty to the Freudian canon and no doubt because of a charisma that could not easily be contained within the ranks), Erikson's was a looming presence in his heyday as academia's most popular icon, the mythic professor sans degree. Among undergraduates like me, he outshone the great school's other luminaries (Lowell, Watson, Levin, Alfred, Riesman, Moynahan, and more) because he spoke directly to our most pressing personal and collective preoccupations in a language at once familiar and revelatory. The vision he offered seemed to us comprehensible and subtle, simple and complex, infusing students and faculty alike with a sense of mission—both interdisciplinary and existential. While quietly playing with and reworking its theoretical frame in ways few colleagues have fully appreciated, Erikson made psychoanalysis come to life for the rest of the world.
During my subsequent journey through the labrynthian world of psychoanalytic training in the 197os and ‘8os, I was shocked and disappointed at the degree to which Erikson's contribution was ignored. In