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It was my misfortune to have known Erik Erikson only through his writings, which I first discovered as a graduate student in the fifties. Years later, I used Childhood and Society in the first course I taught on Freud for philosophers. Erikson gave more texture than Freud did, I felt, to the idea that the mind has a history.
Very few psychoanalysts have had much influence on philosophy: Freud, of course; Melanie Klein, a little; in other countries, though in this one hardly at all, Lacan. Perhaps the neglect of Erikson is due to some of the very qualities many of us appreciate in him most, his disdain for jargon, the breadth of his interests, and the fact that he cared more—or so it seems to me—for the life lived than for theory. Yet those of us who were psychoanalytically minded were influenced by Erikson early on, in something like the way that once you have seen the snow scenes of Breughel, they cast their light over every winter day. Having with great pleasure reread a few of Erikson's books over the last few months, I will outline here what I see now in some of the questions that have interested us both, and what I see also as Erikson's contribution to them.