Erik Erikson's Work: Clinical Implications and Applications

When I considered how one could assess Erikson's impact upon our community of practicing clinicians, I realized something that characterizes not only psychoanalysis but the other social (so called soft) sciences as well. Economics offers an example. There is now a “monetarist” school of economics and it is generally held that the economist Milton Friedman “founded” this school. John Maynard Keynes “founded” another and quite different school of economics. Depending on whether government policy is based upon either Friedman's or Keynes's ideas, the government will enact policies that will have quite different significant impacts upon our lives. Then, while I am not at all well-versed in economics, I think it is a good guess that there is another kind of economist who works, so-to-speak, “within” one or the other major economic school, attempting, one might say to mine its potentialities for issues perhaps not even considered by the founder of the school. Actually, what I have just said occurs also with the so-called hard sciences. But such hard sciences have a relatively easier time of it because there is some greater chance for critical experimentation which will effect the scientific community's belief in the continued viability of one or another school of, say, physics; we all are familiar with the move in physics from Newton to Einstein, and how certain critical experimentation impelled the physical scientific community toward relativity theory.

Now, it is clear that psychoanalysis has not lacked for “founders” of schools, almost right from its beginning: Adler, Jung, Horney, and so forth, and more recently Kohut in this country and Lacan in France. But it is not always so easy to decide who is a “founder” of a school of psychoanalysis and who “mines” within a