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Many years ago, in the 1970s, I was returning from a research trip to the then Soviet Union where I was interviewing Soviet adolescents with the hope of getting a glimpse of how they compared with the youngsters then being treated and studied by my mentor and colleague Erik Homburger Erikson at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. I knew, of course, that it would be no more than a glimpse. However, my central aim in this was to see whether Erikson's “way of looking at things,” as he called his monumental conceptual leap beyond Freud, would make it easier for me to tune in to the nature and shape of Soviet adolescence and its struggles. I was overwhelmed as I interviewed these Russian youngsters by the feeling that Erik's vision had supplied me with an underwater mask without which the new universe I was observing in the Soviet Union would be impenetrably cloudy.
A small example: When I observed, for the sixth time in five days, a tiny cross hung on a gold chain around a teenage girl's neck, usually hiding under a high-necked blouse, I asked the question, “how come?” After all, this was at a time when churches had been turned into museums, “relics” of a long gone culture. The answer was routine: “Well, lots of us are beginning to feel a longing for something more than materialism. This cross is as close as we come.” No one knew where the crosses came from.
So impressed was I with the freshness supplied me by Erikson's organismic view of uniting the inner world with the outer world, that I determined on the way home to stop off in London and finally to have a candid discussion with Anna Freud in Hampstead on the