Identity, Youth and Crisis. Erik H. Erikson New York:  W. W. Norton, 1968.  320 pp.

Erickson has gathered material from many previous essays, including Childhood and Society, in order to explore further his concept of identity. He not only describes identity processes from the standpoint of both patient and analyst but also uses the concept of identity to delineate incisively a wide range of social phenomena—running a gamut from contemporary youth to race, totalitarianism and totalism, womanhood, Israel, and autobiographies of great men. However, as important as an understanding of these social phenomena is, the explication of identity processes as such deserve an extremely careful reading by the practicing psychoanalyst. Although Erikson has been heralded for his work on identity processes in adolescence, this other, interrelated contribution may in the long run be of even greater import.

Over the years, Erikson has put forth a systematic theoretical effort to interrelate psychoanalytic ego psychology with well defined sociocultural processes in a historical context. In the Prologue to Identity, Youth and Crisis he defines the need for a social psychology that is psychoanalytically sophisticated, and for a psychoanalysis that is informed by social psychology. He attempts to differentiate the environment from the individual to a far greater degree than have have Freud and most other psychoanalytic writers. Theoretically, he makes use of the ethological concept of the Umwelt (animals being reciprocal environments for each other), and here he is in line with the thinking of several contemporary psychoanalytic writers, such as Searles, Lichtenstein, and the Menakers. He further takes into account the contemporary historical scene, which has introduced chaos into established social patterns and cultural images, and has thus created severe identity conflicts. By means of case illustration, Erickson delineates the sociocultural and historical factors that must explicitly be taken into account for effective psychoanalytic treatment. He further introduces a