Erik Erikson, Place, and Being at Home in the World

We wish to respond to Corradi's (2024) article on Erik Erikson that was published last year in this journal. We refer to a couple of our publications on our philosophy of place (Gildersleeve & Crowden, 2018; Gildersleeve & Crowden, 2022) to show how the phenomenon of place is conceptually relevant to Erikson's psychosocial developmental theory. In other words, we argue that the life stages that Corradi so effectively outlined relate to the phenomenological expression to feel “not-at-home-in-the-world” (Gildersleeve & Crowden, 2018, p. 79). As will become clear in our letter, we show that unsuccessfully passing through a stage can give a person a feeling of “homelessness” (Gildersleeve & Crowden, 2018, p. 85), when a key feature of constructing a sense of self and identity has not been established.

In our 2018 article, we outlined the relation between place and psychoanalysis. That article focused on Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan, but in this letter we want to outline how this also relates to Erikson's psychological theory of development. We give a few examples to show how feeling “not-home-in-the-world” is experienced as a “return of the repressed” (Gildersleeve & Crowden, 2018, p. 79) if the stages of Erikson's model are not successfully resolved and unified. For example, this may show itself in the first stage of Trust vs. Distrust, where a negative outcome results in “an elemental inability to trust others, [which] correlates highly with severe personality impairment” (Corradi, 2024, p. 19). This personality impairment can create a feeling of being “out of place,” which will affect the child, as “a lasting legacy of failure of the maternal relationship … [and] an expectation that others will fail also, just as mother did” (Corradi, 2024, p. 19).

If we relate this to Jungian psychoanalysis, we can say that unsuccessfully transitioning through a developmental stage will lead to the experience of the “obstructiveness” of a complex (Gildersleeve & Crowden, 2018, p. 79)