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My objective in this essay is to throw light on two questions. First, was Erik Erikson a social scientist? Second, what kind of social scientist was he? My short answer to the first question is “yes”; my short answer to the second question is “a very good one.” I will organize my elaboration of that assessment under four headings:
Erikson, the quintessential interdisciplinarian
Some unresolved methodological issues in his interdisciplinary program
Erikson's diagnosis of and verdict on Western, especially American, society
Erikson's sociological idealism, which contains elements of positive utopianism
Erikson was, above all, a psychoanalyst, and it can be argued plausibly that his most enduring contributions are to psychoanalysis, in the form of his profound recasting of the